Various Artists - Twin Peaks (Limited Event Series Soundtrack)

Why are you reading a review of this? No one's going to randomly stumble upon a review of the score of the third season of a 25 year old show and just be like, “oh, I’ve never heard of the show but, you know, the score to its third season might be the best point of entry!” If you own Badalamenti's other Twin Peaks scores, you're going to buy this. Or you should. I'm not going to tell you how to live your life. So let’s get real: if you’re reading this, you don’t really need a review. You’ve already purchased it or are planning to and are, I don’t know, just curious as to what someone else made of it.

Although...*sigh*…all right, let’s pretend you’re just stumbling onto this because you know someone who has a friend who won’t shut up about the show and that episode and Mr. C and Ike the Spike and “what year is it?”.

This is for you, Brave, Oblivious Listener.

Most of Badalamenti’s numbers flow over you like dark, chilly water; tracks like “Dark Mood Woods / The Red Room”, “Night”, and “The Fireman”. Then there are some scattery, jittery jazz tracks like “Deer Meadow Shuffle”, “Grady Groove”, and “Headless Chicken” that are all playful, but also all contain an insidious element. "Threnody For The Victims Of Hiroshima" followed by "Slow 30s Room”* offers up that special kind of nightmare only Badalamenti in the service of Lynch could create: nothing is okay or will ever be again. The latter of those two is reminiscent of James Kirby’s work as The Caretaker. The final track, “Dark Space Low” is absolutely perfect, the epitome of sad, aching beauty, and should have been four minutes longer.

This is a very specific release, one for which context is pretty essential. If you’re actually just coming to this as a set of songs, there’s going to be some gems, but some of it is going to come off as odd; like the almost chopped and screwed version of Muddy Magnolias' “American Woman”. On the whole, it’s dreamy, melancholic, and a bit jazzy, and you can always skip the tough tracks. Fans of Angelo Badalamenti are going to get this, and people who are not fans of Badalamenti…well, they don’t really matter in this case, do they?

*Composed by Lynch himself and long time ambient sound designer/music supervisor, Dean Hurley, who is also responsible for Anthology Resource Vol. 1: △△.